We are all telling ourselves a story with our thoughts.

Our thoughts generate our emotions.

Our emotions are sustained by the story we tell.

Too often we are telling ourselves an unhelpful story.

We think we must tell ourselves this story. We think this story is just true. But I have found that it is beneficial to question the story, to examine our thoughts, and then intentionally decide if that is the story we want to keep telling, and thus keep living.

When we hold onto the story of all that has gone wrong, we feel discouraged and defeated.

We must practice awareness of unconscious negativity, of sneaky places where we are telling ourselves a story that is not serving us.

We must stop arguing with reality. When we think it shouldn’t be this way, we are fighting against the reality that this is the way it is. We must choose to trust that God allowed what has happened in our life. We must choose to believe He is working for our good. We must choose to remember that God is with us and for us and working all things together for our good even when we cannot see it.

We must practice having faith! We must strengthen our faith “muscle” by practicing believing!

Sometimes we need to acknowledge that we are holding onto old ways of being that are no longer serving us and choose to live into a new way for this season.

God is inviting us to something more than what has been. God is constantly calling us/inviting us into a deeper relationship with Him. And getting to that better relationship means trusting Him through all that has happened, is happening, and will happen in life. We must accept that this is part of it. We must choose to believe that nothing has gone wrong.

We have conditioned ourselves to be a certain way then we keep recreating it with unhelpful patterns. We must retrain our brains. We have to be willing to be uncomfortable, to do the work, to get to where we want to be. We must surrender and believe that God will transform us as we fall more and more in love with Him.

We start by practicing awareness of the thoughts we are thinking. We practice noticing and naming how and what we are feeling. “I feel full of emotions today.” “I feel sort of out of sorts today.” “I feel a bit irritated today.” “I am feeling overwhelmed.” Just noticing whatever is coming up without making ourselves wrong or beating ourselves up or thinking we should be different. Asking ourselves some questions, being curious, and kind to ourselves. Learning to accept where we are today and being with ourselves there.

This is an on-going practice. I’ll admit I am better at it some days than others.

We practice trusting that God is good. We practice trusting that God loves us no matter what. We practice believing that nothing can separate us from His love. We practice believing we do not know the rest of our story!

We are always just dealing with the current piece of our story. What is happening right now. We decide what we are going to do now. Not what is someone else going to do but what am I going to do because I am the only person I can control. We also must choose to believe that the other person will figure out what they need to do. God has got us! And God has got them.

We do our work on our thoughts and what we are creating in our life. We stop meddling in other people’s lives. It feels easier to get caught up in other people’s problems/emotions because then we do not have to work on our own.

Too often we are mirroring other people’s emotions because we have not learned to process our own emotions. We think we can only be happy if they are happy. We have to stop worrying about how we think they are doing it wrong or what they should be doing. They are their own people. They get to have their own ideas and make their own choices. We do not have to make it mean anything “bad” about us. We have to stop wasting our precious energy on them, trying to control what we cannot control, and start using our energy on ourselves, who we can control. We have to learn to manage our minds and our emotions and accept the fact that we cannot manage someone else’s emotions.

We have to accept that it is not the responsibility of other people to make us happy. We have to take responsibility for generating our own joy by telling ourselves a good story, God’s story, about us and our lives. We also must accept that no matter what other people do or do not do we can be joyful because our thoughts create our emotions not our external circumstances.

This can be a hard concept to agree with at first. We think you don’t understand what is happening in my life, you don’t know what they did, you don’t know what I am dealing with. We all have “stuff” in our lives that we are dealing with the thoughts we think about that “stuff” causes how we feel about it. We can practice just letting it be without making it mean anything bad. Even if terrible things are happening is the story, I am telling, helping me enjoy my life.

We must acknowledge that too often we are overly enmeshed with other people’s lives. We need to stay in our “lane.” We need to stop looking to them for approval and our worth and instead look to God who says we are loved, enough, worthy, and valuable just as we are. We do not have to “do” anything to earn it, we just need to accept and receive it!

We choose the story we are telling ourselves. We have agency over the thoughts we allow to hang around in our minds. The thoughts we think create the feelings we feel. We have taught ourselves to think a certain way based on our survival instincts as a child but now as adults we get to decide if we want to keep thinking that way. We get to decide if the stories we have been telling are still serving us.

We can choose the thoughts we think, renewing our minds on God’s Truth and be transformed! We can choose to trust and believe Him! We can believe that He loves us and is with us and is working all things together for our good.

We keep seeking and discovering and maturing and becoming! Moment by moment. Day by day. It is not always easy. We will have good days and bad days. We will be better at managing our minds sometimes and other times we will not. This is all part of it. Nothing has gone wrong. This is just the human experience. As we strengthen our faith muscle it will get easier. We will learn to turn back to God more quickly. And as we trust God more and more, He will expand our capacity to live more fully into all our humanity!

This is my story. What is yours?